3 critical problems with Orianna's lore
With the talk of the new lore finally being integrated into the client, it pushed me to write up the thoughts that had been brewing over Ori's lore update from a while ago, since it will make more official the eradication of the last vestige of the character I know and love. This will be a little more specific than just a "Why does riot keep breaking things that aren't broken?" rant though, even though that is still a totally valid question that seems to bear repeating every new update. I mean Seriously riot, why? You're like George fucking Lucas about this shit. Rather I want to go over 3 critical problems with Orianna's characterization brought on by her new bio, that cause serious internal consistency problems with her as a champ in the game.
The 3 big problems are
-Redundancy -Internal logic -Superficial depiction
Redundancy - The first and to me most glaring issue, and one that seems to fly in the face of riot's own self described plan of diversifying champs into unique roles and characters. Orianna's lore update came out with Camille and Viktor's lore update, and it's mind boggling to me even now that riot would actively change an old character to fill the same idea space and archetype as both a new character and an existing one all in one fell swoop. Specifically I'm talking about having a character giving up their physical humanity and replacing it with machinery. This is an interesting topic for sure, but can it really carry THREE characters? No, scratch that, FOUR characters now that urgot's updated characterization is ALSO about a man driven to replacing body parts with machinery. This is an absurd overcrowding of a character trait made more insulting by the fact that Orianna's old characterization was given up for it.
Internal logic - When the lore update first went through, I legitimately believed that Orianna's bio and color story were written by two people who did not communicate with each other and that whoever wrote her new bio hadn't even read her old one. This is because she is written as completely different things in them. In the fieram story, Orianna is depicted as a robot, talks about having a human expression like shrugging "installed", and desperately wants to connect with another sentient machine like herself. This is critically at odds with what she should be going by her updated biography; a human girl in a mechanical body who has lost emotional connection with the people around her. Furthermore, her new character as of the bio completely contradicts the in game Orianna, the robot built to replace a dead daughter, who's role, personality, and attitude have nothing in common with some "sweet innocent girl" who underwent extensive prosthesis. The new bio makes a purposeful point of her removing her key, even though it's a huge part of her visual design and doesn't really make much sense story wise. Why was a wind up key required to keep a human heart beating? Why did she still have a human heart when the heart's only function is to circulate blood that she wouldn't have through vessels that she wouldn't have to bring oxygen to organs she wouldn't have? Why is a heart more difficult to replace than a human brain? We have artificial hearts NOW and replacing a brain is a ridiculous pipe dream.
Superficial depiction - The Idea of Orianna being a girl that gradually replaced human body parts with machinery simply doesn't fit with the visual character we are given. If that were the case, why doesn't Orianna look like a patchwork of artificial organs and limbs? How does one replace organs with gears? Her torso literally floats over her pelvis which is a turbine that shoots bladed rings, what body part did that replace and when?
Orianna would need an entirely new visual design, and entirely new voice over, and entirely new personality, and completely redone animations to bring her in line with the character the new bio sets up, and that brings me to the overall conclusion that her lore update is critically flawed. Critically, as in not salvageably. In order to resolve this conflict of depictions, one of two things will have to happen. The in game orianna will have to be destroyed, or the updated Orianna as re-written will have to be discarded, either reverted to something akin to her original character, or redone as some new thing yet again. I know that Riot is loathe to walk back any of their new changes, no matter how unpopular, and Orianna's update was largely lost in a whirlwind of other far more scandalous updates, but the inevitable nature of this problem coming to bear tells me that riot will be forced to do something one way or the other so I'd like to at least give my 2 cents in the vain hope that they consider it when the time comes.
Riot, the people who care about your characters don't want Shakespeare or Tolkien. It'd be nice if you provided the greatest prose and world building ever written, but frankly we don't expect or need it. What we want is consistency. We want to see more of the characters we've come to know. Not some new story revolving around a stranger with their name. It broke my heart when I read Orianna's new bio about a character that was both figuratively and literally a different person from the one I loved.
